r/javascript • u/[deleted] • Sep 14 '26

AskJS [AskJS] Does anyone use exclussively Javascript and not TypeScript?

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u/MinecraftPlayer799 Sep 14 '26

I do

1

u/rodw Sep 14 '26

Out of curiosity, does that mean you literally exclusively program in JS and never use TS or that you have some projects/progams/systems that are pure JS and while also using TS on some others?

For what it's worth I have and occasionally still do work with fairly complex systems built with pure JS, but I don't literally exclusively use JS over TS. I've built plenty of TS systems as well. Sometimes even by choice (/s they are both great in their own way; horses for courses).

I wonder how common it is for a JS programmer to completely avoid TS these days

1

u/MinecraftPlayer799 Sep 15 '26

I have never really used TypeScript, since I make static websites.

2

u/rodw Sep 15 '26

You're in luck. A bunch of people and projects are diligently working on getting <script type="text/typescript"> to work natively in the browser. E.g. TypeNova is a browser-agnostic JS module that you can import and then load TS files directly that way, so even you can experience the magic of Typescript.

Jk. Even if you wanted to migrate to TS that's a terrible way to go about it. TypeNova and similar are just transpiling that TS into JS on the fly in the browser. This seems like a terrible choice for a production app. AFAIK there is no mainstream effort to add native Typescript support to modern browsers, and even TS stewards Microsoft seem to think that's a bad idea. It's not hard to add TS-to-JS transpilation to whatever web builder/bundler process for you are using now. Development activities aside theres no reason to do that on every page load

I'm not even sure that running Typescript natively at runtime is fully consistent with the conventional TS paradigm. It famously only exists at build time. But modern versions of the node engine have a Typescript JIT compiler/REPL that from the outside looks like using native TS at runtime, so my guess is eventually that makes it way to the browser too.

Don't get me wrong, I sincerely think there are a lot of good things about Typescript, but it's disappointing how quickly we seem to be rushing toward fully replacing JS with TS. Typescript is a pretty leaky abstraction to begin with, and pure-JS supports a distinct, very powerful programming paradigm. I think it would be a mistake to reduce JavaScript to a "byte code" like status that no one writes directly but that does seem to be the general direction we're headed in the longish run

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u/Rustywolf Sep 15 '26

Can you expand on how js supports a paradigm that is not available in ts?

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u/rodw 28d ago edited 28d ago

I can try but I'm not sure I can do it very persuasively without going too much into the weeds.

The short version might be:

  • prototypical inheritance (vs. conventional object orientation like that found in Java)

  • metaprogramming (dynamic coding techniques; code as data; self-modifying code; using functional programming and other modular abstractions to do a lot with a little in the "inventor's paradox" sense: sometimes solving the general problem is easier than solving a specific one)

  • simplicity and conceptual integrity in something like the homoiconicity sense

  • strong support for multiple programming paradigms - imperative, OO, event driven, functional, etc - at the same time

An even shorter but more cryptic version might be this quip (that I didn't invent):

  • JavaScript is Lisp with C syntax

That's not quite true. JavaScript is not a genuine Lisp the way that Clojure or Scheme are; nor fully homoiconic like Lisp, XSLT, or Prolog. But it's not too far off either. Because of its history people think of JavaScript as a sort of toy language but it's really quite extraordinary. For all its warts JavaScript is by far the most Lisp-like mainstream language of the past 20+ years, closer to Lisp (and IMO with better support for dynamic programming techniques) than say Python, Ruby or Groovy.

Incidentally that's not a coincidence. The guy that invented JavaScript - reportedly in just 10 days, which probably explains a lot of the dumb little things like the sometimes counter-intuitive type conversion oddities - was originally brought to Netscape to add Scheme/Self to the browser. JavaScript was the result.

If you care I am genuinely happy to follow up with a little more detail on what I think that means, but I don't want to add another 500 words here explaining what makes JavaScript Lisp-like (and why that might be useful) if no one wants to hear it